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Something for Exalted

Still in work, for my new Exalted campaign. The "Kingdom of Fugai" is where we started in session one (last week) and I thought "hey, let's detail the surroundings a little more!"

See what came from it.

One question, though. How would I go about creating hills in the same greenish tone as the ground? When I use the technique I know from Pasis the hills are barely visible and can't be distinguished from the surroundings...

Hm... definitely a start, many thanks. Could you tell me how you did it? Maybe I can tool around with your input and see for myself how it all works out

Using GIMP. I have the Felimage plugin, and used the Puffy "style" to render some noise onto a new transparent layer. You can hide this layer for now as you can delete it later since we just need it for a few minutes. Create a new layer and fill with 50% grey and set the layer mode to overlay. Run the Bump map filter on the grey layer with the bumps coming from the noise layer I created earlier. Now, add a layer mask set to black, select the layer mask itself and paint white using the paintbrush or airbrush(prefered) where you want the hills to show up on the map.

You can do this process in Photoshop, but I don't think the out of the box noise is that good from what I understand from those who use PS.

I made a quick try as well and I hope this helps. So what I did was that I added 2 new layers, one for the hills and one for the additional ground texture.

Ground textures:
on top with layer type set as hard light
Just painted around with large brush and low opacity using spring texture from genetica viewer. By this I got additional variation to the grass ground.

the original map layer:
set the layer type as multiply in order to get the underlying hills layer visible

Hills:
Layer is below your original map and it has some special effects (Bevel and emboss).
Bevel size is 10
Contour 40
texture depth is 30% with some rocky pattern
Painted the hills with low opacity brush using some rocky texture.

and if you want to have the hills more green just make sure the textute you use for the hills is more green than the one I had. the texture you use with the hills doesn't have to be good looking at all as it will not be that visible. And if you want to have smoother hills then lower the hills layer texture depth.